The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and
Well-Being in the United States and Britain since
1950.

Article Type:

Book review

Subject:

Books
(Book reviews)

Author:

Matt, Susan J.

Pub Date:

09/22/2009

Publication:

Name: Journal of Social History Publisher: Journal of Social History Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: History; Sociology and social work Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Journal of Social
History ISSN:0022-4529

Issue:

Date: Fall, 2009 Source Volume: 43 Source Issue: 1

Topic:

NamedWork: The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in
the United States and Britain Since 1950 (Nonfiction work)

Persons:

Reviewee: Offer, Avner

Accession Number:

209577956

Full Text:

The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the
United States and Britain since 1950. By Avner Offer (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006. xviii + 454 pp.).

In The Challenge of Affluence, Avner Offer explores the
"paradox of affluence"--why "the flow of new goods can
undermine the capacity to enjoy them." [p. 2] He suggests that
since the end of World War II, America has experienced the effects of
this paradox, and that the U.K. is following in its footsteps. Both
nations enjoy affluence, but, overall, their citizens' happiness is
not increasing. Why is this?

Offer suggests that such a situation has arisen because of
"myopic choice"--consumer decisions that may bring pleasure in
the short term but harm in the long term. Essentially, citizens of
affluent societies have lost the ability to control themselves--an irony
in an economic system that for so long depended on self-control and
delayed gratification. In modern consumer society, rewards and pleasures
come at such a rapid rate that individuals have insufficient time to
master strategies of self-discipline.

According to Offer, the problem of diminished self-control in the
midst of abundance has become acute over the last 50 years, and worsened
since the 1970s. It was then that the U.S., and to some extent, the
U.K., began to move away from collectivist goals and towards the
promotion of individual pleasure and profit.

Offer supports these claims with general studies of well being and
affluence and with more in-depth examinations of particular products and
social trends. His first chapters, densely written economic analyses,
show that while affluence has increased in many western industrialized
countries, happiness levels have either stagnated or declined since the
1970s. Affluence has made people happier, but overall, they might have
been better off with slightly less.

More interesting to social and cultural historians are his
examinations of particular innovations of consumer society and their
effects on social well being. He explores how advertising undermines
trust by making individuals doubt claims--both those found in ads, and
those made by neighbors and friends. Ads take on a falsely sincere tone;
consumers realize this and become cynical not just about advertisements
but about other forms of rhetoric and interaction as well.

If consumer society makes doubters of its citizens, it also harms
them in other ways. Offer explains how members of affluent societies
have become obese as a result of myopic choices. Consumer society also
offers a host of distracting devices--radios, televisions, dvds, and
ipods-which provide recreation and sensual gratification, but little
else. Consumers are more interested in purchasing these devices than in
buying time-saving appliances, yet quickly tire of the amusement they
provide.

Affluence has more pernicious effects. According to Offer it not
only deadens senses and weighs down bodies, it affects self-image and
relationships. The cost of low status in an affluent society is
high--individuals suffer physical and psychological woes; violence
increases at lower socio-economic levels as well. Marriage also changes
in the midst of plenty. Individuals are more likely to invest in
short-term pleasure than commit to long- term relationships. Love, in
short, has become just another commodity. As a result of the emotional
volatility brought on by unstable family relationships, rates of
anxiety, depression, and suicide have increased in affluent nations.

The Challenge of Affluence makes an interesting and provocative
argument; chapters build upon chapters, and by the end of the book,
Offer has drawn a damning portrait of consumer society. The portrait is
sweeping; few individuals populate it, for this is a book about behavior
in the aggregate. That approach makes economic forces seem extremely
powerful, and individual consumers exceedingly weak. Men and women have
little agency in Offer's portrayal. He suggests that the ability to
fight some of the temptations of affluence increases with education and
cultural capital; nevertheless, there is little individual will on
display in this book. He says as much when he writes, "I see the
prime driver in technological change and its concomitant, economic
growth. Individuals respond primarily to what is placed before their
eyes, by parents, schools, partners, work, markets. They cannot envisage
the social consequences of their individual choices, and even if they
could, they would not be able to change them." [p. 365] While
Offer's basic point, that consumerism gives birth to new types of
unhappiness and pathologies, is well-supported and compelling, his mode
of explanation underestimates the variety of human motivations, desires,
and abilities. It is also somewhat monocausal. Surely it is not just
affluence that lies at the root of these problems.

Another question that crops up is how much of this behavior is
actually new. Offer suggests these changes occurred after World War II.
However, much of what he has to say about America has been circulating
since the 19th century. Tocqueville, for instance, noted that Americans
exhibited a "strange melancholy ... in the midst of
abundance," and wrote of a "disgust with life sometimes
gripping them in calm and easy circumstances." He characterized
Americans as obsessed with physical pleasure, ever eager to move one
step higher on the status ladder, ceaselessly striving for better
things, never happy where they were. This constant struggle for
advancement resulted in high rates of insanity in the U.S. (1) Later
authors also concluded that affluence did not bring happiness. During
the late nineteenth century, a host of observers worried that bourgeois
Americans were becoming pale, flabby creatures, victims of the modern
comforts they had created. Americans' desires--for wealth, comfort,
new things--have long troubled observers. This is not to say that
Offer's analysis is wrong; merely that the problem he describes is
not new.

Yet Offer's approach is novel. Historians of consumer society
generally rely on research traditions within the humanities rather than
on statistical studies from the social sciences. Offer bucks this trend
and uses the tools of an economist to reveal important trends within
American and British culture. The Challenge of Affluence should interest
economic, cultural, and social historians. Ultimately, it is an
interesting and compelling book, and makes an important, if
controversial, point.